• Which the release of FS2020 we see an explosition of activity on the forun and of course we are very happy to see this. But having all questions about FS2020 in one forum becomes a bit messy. So therefore we would like to ask you all to use the following guidelines when posting your questions:

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New (old) starter.........

C

coanda

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unitedkingdom
Hi chaps and (dare I say it) chapesses,

I'm new here and just trying ot get to grips with things.....

I've decided that I'd like to take a shot at developing aircraft for FSX. I've been using X-Plane for the last few years to develop aircraft, and I'm an aerospace engineer day to day, so the whole aeroplane thing isn't a problem.....My problem is getting used to how FSX wants its aircraft...would it be possible to give a short overview on how to create a flight model for FSX? I understand that there is a config file, and, leading on from this, a .air file which contains all the tables, I guess I'd like to know how I go about creating and editing these files?

My first Aircraft is going to be a Mk.6 Hawker Hunter....so I'm looking forward to getting stuck into the learning curve of 3ds max....seems to be allot different from the AC3D that I usually use....

Cheers

Coanda
 
Hi,

I'm a relative novice when it comes to developing aircraft for FS X compared to others here, but I'll give it my best shot!

would it be possible to give a short overview on how to create a flight model for FSX?
Click to expand...
As you've probably read in these forums, I too was wondering how best to get started with developing a flight model for FS X. What I ended up doing was taking one of the stock aircraft from FS that most closely matched the aircraft I was modelling (mainly in so far as being jet or piston, single, 2 or 4 engined etc) and then editing the .air file with a tool called "AirEd".

I started with editing the aircraft.cfg file with notepad, and editing the aircraft geometry. Once that was done, I started to investigate the .air file to see what parameters did what, then started the cycle of tweak, test, tweak some more, test... until I got it flying reasonably close to the book figures (note that this is probably NOT recommended as I was working with the wrong model and everything associated with that!!! I'm sure I'm going to regret it when I start using the correct visual model with correct CoG points etc). I would suggest starting on the visual model first.

One thing I did find is that despite what is written in the SDKs, the .air files do not appear to contain geometry information for the aircraft directly. There is also a distinct lack of any information on the .air files in the SDKs. Not very helpful! I intend to compile a list of what the various parameters within the .air file do, based on testing. There are still a lot of unknown parameters within the .air file, and quite a few that appear to do nothing.

I'm trying at the moment, to identify all the parts of the .air file using a hex editor, so that I can experiment a bit more with extending the .air file. There is another utility that can dump the .air file as ASCII, allowing you to edit the length of the tables and their parameters in plain english, then re-build the .air file from that, but I've had limited success with it (the problems arise when re-building the .air file). The program I've tried for that is AirDat. I can't remember where I got these from though. :o

I hope I've helped a little bit. :o

Best regards,
Robin.
 
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